Building on her exhibition at The Kitchen this summer, Xaviera Simmons continues the CODED project with a new movement-based performance that mines art-historical, online, and archival images—as they relate to queer history, homoerotic imagery, and landscape, as well as Jamaican dancehall culture—to map new conceptual territory. Her dynamic, interdisciplinary approach to art-making is rooted in an ongoing investigation of experience, memory, and present and future histories, specifically focusing on shifting notions surrounding landscape and character, as well as conversations between formal processes. Simmons’ particular vocabulary of movement, text, sound, and image offers ways of looking at mapping, pleasure, and sensuality in a queer context and in an island context. Organized by Matthew Lyons.

In 1971, Sun Ra said “Black people need a mythocracy, not a democracy because they'll never make it in history.…Truth is not permissible for me to use because I'm not righteous and holy, I'm evil, that's because I'm black and I'm not subscribed to any types of righteousness.” Sondra Perry's new video installation examines this active disinterest in the respectability that blackness has been perpetually asked to earn by white culture, providing a site in which her work, as well its viewers, can begin to reimagine standing value systems and moral structures. Through the lens of the Alien movie franchise— one which has been providing allegories of colonialism and mutability for decades—Perry's work asks: how do agents of power behave when their subjects become absolutely unpredictable, fluidly inhabiting societal norms in order to destroy them? How can these defiantly multiplicitous subjects be watched? And how is veracity redefined by this surveillance? Curated by Lumi Tan.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce Carrie Mae Weems’ first solo exhibition in New York City since the historic retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2014. Her influential career continues to address the rifts caused by race, class, and gender via imagery and text that is both sharply direct and beautifully poetic. This two-part exhibition highlights her recent investigations into performance, entertainment, and history.
Blue Notes (2014) and An Essay on Equivalents, See… (2011-2015) highlight figures on the periphery, bringing them front and center. The photographic series are paired with the enigmatic video installation Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me (2012), originally commissioned by the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. The work rests on a 19th century optical trick, “Pepper’s ghost,” in which a strategically lit pane of glass reflects people and objects as dematerialized versions on stage. Weems employs this phantasmagoria to examine her own relationship to history and two individuals in particular: the 16th president of the United States and artist/activist Lonnie Graham, her sometime collaborator. Here history becomes theater, a succession of ghostly projections that draw us in to the strange ways in which representation seduces and manipulates, and how some are left out of history altogether, their apparitions left to haunt the expanses of Western culture.
The theme of performance continues with Scenes & Take (2016). Weems dons her black-robed muse persona—recognizable from the now iconic Roaming and Museums series—to stand before empty stage sets, documenting these encounters with vivid color photographs. The contemplative pose of the artist raises issues of who gets to be shown on screen; what do the fictional characters in television, theater, cinema, and visual art say about the cultural climate in which they are created, and how do these representations shift across time?
All the Boys (2016) responds to the recent killings of young African American men and suggests a darker reality of identity construction. Portraits of black men in hooded sweatshirts are matched with text panels. The written descriptions evoke police reports, underscoring how a demographic is all-too-often targeted and presumed guilty by a system plagued with prejudice.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition demonstrates that visual representation is ultimately performance: a tightly composed, laborious narrative. It takes serious work to unravel and refocus the greater dialogue toward inclusivity and acceptance. To look closely—past the bright lights, illusions, and constructions—is the first, crucial step.
Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Prospect.3 New Orleans; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. A solo exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl…, is currently on view through January 7, 2017 at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University. Her work is also part of Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art at Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University through January 8, 2017.
Weems has received a multitude of awards, grants, and fellowships including Anderson Ranch Arts Center’s National Artist Award; The Art of Change Ford Foundation Fellowship; the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal; the MacArthur “Genius” grant; US Department of State’s Medals of Arts; Anonymous Was A Woman Award; Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; the National Endowment of the Arts; and the Louis Comfort TIfffany Award; among many others.
She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

“I was drawn to painting tower blocks not because I had any personal message to say, but because I felt that it was a striking element of the landscape. It’s like Constable had the Stour Valley and Turner had the Medway, and I have Camberwell. This is what landscape painters do – they keep going back to familiar subjects and views and finding new inspiration in them. Cézanne used to say that he could always paint the Mont Saint Victoire. By moving his feet a few inches, he would find a new view. By changing his position, only slightly, he would find another painting.” - David Hepher

Flowers Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of paintings by British artist David Hepher, the artist’s first solo presentation in the United States. For forty years British artist David Hepher has focused his singular vision on the domestic high-rises of South London, through which he has channelled the diverse currents that have swept the international world of contemporary art. Finding his subject in the expansive social housing estates built throughout the 1960s and 70s, Hepher has captured the formal beauty of their grid-like structures as well as the physical and emotional traces of their inhabitants.
The paintings in the present exhibition span the past two decades. In paintings of the 2000’s such as Winterreise, the austere realist style of Hepher’s early work was replaced by an increased engagement with the physical nature of the subject matter, and appropriation of architectural elements such as concrete and spray paint within his mixed media paintings. Works such as Durrington Towers II have been prepared with a brutal shuttered concrete ground, which replicates the builder’s application of textured facades, and pushes the paintings to the brink of abstraction. The surface is overlaid with the spraycan scrawls and slogans of found graffiti, alongside Hepher’s own marks and art historical motifs, softening the hard-edged geometric structures with the feathered curves of gestural expression.

A recent series of smaller works, known collectively as ‘pavement horizons’, marks a distinct shift in viewpoint and scale. Honing in on the juncture at which the buildings rise from the ground, each painting portrays a life-size frontal view of a section of concrete wall and the right angle it forms with the pavement, presenting an intimate record of an ordinarily overlooked aspect of the landscape. While the concrete draws the eye to the surface, they can also conjure the impression of a sublime landscape, an illusion upheld by evocative titles such as Cloudburst and The Monk by the Sea, the latter named after a work by German Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich. In contrast to the monumentality of the towers, their human scale places the viewer in close physical proximity to the subject, inviting intimate reflection on the quiet aesthetic qualities of these frequently bypassed details of modern life.

NEW YORK – Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of work by Mark di Suvero. The exhibit highlights the artist’s continued preeminence in abstract sculpture throughout his near-sixty-year career. The show, on view at 534 West 21st Street, will be up from November 3rd through December 10th, 2016. The opening reception is on Friday, November 4th from 6 to 8pm.

As art historian Barbara Rose stated, “[Mark di Suvero’s] genius lies in his unique ability to fuse the excitement of the momentary … with the gravity of a timeless geometry and the engineered ability and intuitive equilibrium that his hard-won mastery of structural balances makes possible.” His works thrive on the collision of geometric and organic forms through spontaneous experimentation. “I don’t draw detailed plans,” he said. “I start with a vision … and see where it goes.” Di Suvero executes and installs his sculptures himself. Designing and revising throughout every step of construction, he welds, bends, cuts and bolts with illimitable buoyancy. The vast metal sheet plate becomes a blank piece of paper on top of which he crawls to sketch freehand forms with chalk. The industrial crane becomes an extension of the artist’s arm, handled as if he were painting with a massive brush. Activated by this spirited process, the final structures assert a dynamic and irrefutable presence.

Ranging from three to thirteen feet in height, the midsize scale of the works on view accommodates an especially wide range of formal improvisation that highlights the artist’s constructivist foundation and expansive manipulation of line and space. Composed of beams of wood and painted steel, the manifold planes of Untitled (hungblock), 1962, extend with a kinetic yet delicate thrust, while Nextro, 2003, offers an enigmatic staccato of linear and spherical elements. A recent work from 2015 entitled Post-Matisse Pullout draws inspiration from the cut-outs of the French artist, Henri Matisse. The playful potential for imminent change contained in its bowing curvilinear form recalls the mutable paper and thumbtacks used by Matisse for continuous alterations.

Mark di Suvero currently lives and works in New York. His first retrospective was at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975 and was accompanied by a citywide exhibition of large-scale works. The artist has had acclaimed international exhibitions in Nice (1991), Venice (1995, on the occasion of the 46th Venice Biennale) and Paris (1997), among others. In 2011, eleven monumental works were installed on Governors Island in New York Harbor. Organized by Storm King Art Center this marked the largest outdoor exhibition of work in New York since the 1970s. That same year di Suvero received the National Medal of Arts, the nation’s highest honor given to artists. From May 2013-2014, SFMOMA presented eight monumental sculptures in the city’s historic Crissy Field for a yearlong outdoor exhibition. In September 2016, two monumental works were installed on Chicago’s Lakeshore Drive through a partnership between the Chicago Park District and EXPO CHICAGO. These works will be on view through 2017. One can also see a number of di Suvero sculptures at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York, permanently installed.

Margaret Thatcher Projects is excited to present Spectral Flux, a series of works constructed of luminously painted bars of cast acrylic by Freddy Chandra.

In what will be his second solo exhibition at the gallery, Chandra further expands on the ephemeral nature of the moving image, sound, and oscillation. While his works are grounded in the language of abstract painting, Chandra visually and conceptually references scientific notions of timbre, frequency, and spectrum to reflect the inevitable synchronicity of light, color, and noise.

To Chandra, elusive everyday moments such as overhearing a fragment of music only to hear it fade away, observing a lustrous sunset framed by a window, feeling the vibrations and movements of people and vehicles as they pass by, are all fluctuating instances that are experienced and recorded in a seemingly spectrographic way.

To manifest this awareness Chandra structures his work within the confines of a logical and algorithmic process. Color is painted across the surface of the bars in such a way as to create an illusion of depth and an inner light that lends the pieces a lyrical flow. The rectilinear positioning and composition of the pieces implies dynamic movement as the colors vibrate off one another while the luminous bars engage with the negative space of the wall that drifts between them.

Although it is evident that Chandra’s works are grounded in the language of painting, they are simultaneously rooted in the notion of drawing. The physical process of pulling and stretching hundreds of lines across the space directly refers back to the practice of mark-making. In this manner the clarity of structure and drafting, bridges an important relation to Chandra’s background in architecture.

Through experimenting with specific color relationships, value shifts, and dimensional modulations of density and transparency, Chandra makes tangible the act of recognition, recollection and the anticipation to understand the present moment between time and space.

Freddy Chandra studied Architecture and Art Practice at the University of California at Berkeley, and obtained his M.F.A in Studio Art from Mills College in Oakland where he is currently an adjunct faculty member. He is a recipient of a 2009 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, and has been awarded various residencies and fellowships throughout the United States. He regularly exhibits work in the US, Canada, Germany and Italy.

Jack Shainman Gallery is pleased to announce Carrie Mae Weems’ first solo exhibition in New York City since the historic retrospective at the Guggenheim in 2014. Her influential career continues to address the rifts caused by race, class, and gender via imagery and text that is both sharply direct and beautifully poetic. This two-part exhibition highlights her recent investigations into performance, entertainment, and history.
Blue Notes (2014) and An Essay on Equivalents, See… (2011-2015) highlight figures on the periphery, bringing them front and center. The photographic series are paired with the enigmatic video installation Lincoln, Lonnie, and Me (2012), originally commissioned by the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA. The work rests on a 19th century optical trick, “Pepper’s ghost,” in which a strategically lit pane of glass reflects people and objects as dematerialized versions on stage. Weems employs this phantasmagoria to examine her own relationship to history and two individuals in particular: the 16th president of the United States and artist/activist Lonnie Graham, her sometime collaborator. Here history becomes theater, a succession of ghostly projections that draw us in to the strange ways in which representation seduces and manipulates, and how some are left out of history altogether, their apparitions left to haunt the expanses of Western culture.
The theme of performance continues with Scenes & Take (2016). Weems dons her black-robed muse persona—recognizable from the now iconic Roaming and Museums series—to stand before empty stage sets, documenting these encounters with vivid color photographs. The contemplative pose of the artist raises issues of who gets to be shown on screen; what do the fictional characters in television, theater, cinema, and visual art say about the cultural climate in which they are created, and how do these representations shift across time?
All the Boys (2016) responds to the recent killings of young African American men and suggests a darker reality of identity construction. Portraits of black men in hooded sweatshirts are matched with text panels. The written descriptions evoke police reports, underscoring how a demographic is all-too-often targeted and presumed guilty by a system plagued with prejudice.
Taken as a whole, the exhibition demonstrates that visual representation is ultimately performance: a tightly composed, laborious narrative. It takes serious work to unravel and refocus the greater dialogue toward inclusivity and acceptance. To look closely—past the bright lights, illusions, and constructions—is the first, crucial step.
Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Frist Center for Visual Art, Nashville; The Cleveland Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Prospect.3 New Orleans; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain. A solo exhibition, Carrie Mae Weems: I once knew a girl…, is currently on view through January 7, 2017 at the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery of African & African American Art at Harvard University. Her work is also part of Southern Accent: Seeking the American South in Contemporary Art at Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University through January 8, 2017.
Weems has received a multitude of awards, grants, and fellowships including Anderson Ranch Arts Center’s National Artist Award; The Art of Change Ford Foundation Fellowship; the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal; the MacArthur “Genius” grant; US Department of State’s Medals of Arts; Anonymous Was A Woman Award; Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; The Herb Alpert Award in the Arts; the National Endowment of the Arts; and the Louis Comfort TIfffany Award; among many others.
She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada; and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

Robert Mann Gallery is pleased to present Jeff Brouws: Typologies, Projects & Portfolios 1991-2016. Practicing what he terms “visual anthropology” Brouws, over the past twenty-five years, has persistently pursued a body of work that closely examines the evolving American cultural landscape. Taking inspiration from the “anonymous sculpture” studies of Hilla and Bernd Becher, the New Topographics Movement, and the deadpan artist books of Ed Ruscha, Brouws has produced visual archives—focused mainly on architectural forms—that forge his own photographic territory. Without romanticizing his subject matter, the photographs subtly ask us to consider the economic or social forces that have shaped the built environment—from its initial development to its eventual demise.

In 1991, for his Twentysix Abandoned Gasoline Stations project, Brouws began documenting elements of the evolving highway landscape: service stations owned by independent operators (instead of multi-national corporations) were being challenged by new EPA mandates to replace aging underground storage tanks or risk closure. Many, sensing government collusion with Big Oil (as later substantiated by the Los Angeles Times), were unable to upgrade and forced into abandonment. Brouws recorded them at this moment of discard. While doing this project Brouws simultaneously became aware of Ed Ruscha’s book Twentysix Gasoline Stations from 1962. Referencing Ruscha’s title (with a slight modification) he created a body of work reflecting a changing car culture environment vastly different than the era depicted in Ruscha’s photographs—where fuel was cheap, the open road beckoned, and friendlier global relations prevailed. This early project became an act of art “appropriation” that also signaled a growing awareness (for the artist) that every physical structure in the man-made environment is a “tell” that references political, economic, or social relations.

For his Freshly Painted (Tract) House series, Brouws—who grew up in Daly City, California (a town made famous by Malvina Williams’ song “Little Boxes On The Hillside”)—returned to his former neighborhood to document yet another cultural shift: an influx of Asian immigrants moving into a former all-white enclave who painted their houses in colors then unfamiliar to a pre-Martha Stewart, middle-class America. While mildly humorous the house photographs nonetheless denote an important moment in the history of suburbia, where one ethnic group attains home ownership to gain a toe hold on the American Dream as an earlier group, further up the economic ladder takes “white flight,” moving to the exurbs on the periphery.

His latest Coaling Tower series begun in 2013, is an homage to the Bechers as well as a continuation of his life-long interest in the railroad landscape, its environs, and sites of de-industrialization. These monolithic structures are “retired-in-place” relicts from railroading’s steam era still standing along main lines and brownfields throughout the Eastern United States and Canada. In our modern times, where technological marvels are celebrated as they become faster and more compact, these oversized concrete behemoths, while now moribund, remind us of earlier technologies and earlier architectural achievements built on a grander scale. To capture these monuments of the Industrial Age Brouws used contemporary mapping technology, meticulously researching the locations of 105 extant examples via internet sites and Google Earth satellite imagery.

Over the last several years Brouws has also been studying late nineteenth and early twentieth century photography and the presentation formats of that era, especially the stereograph. Brouws writes of this project that he calls the American Industrial Heritage Series:

The American stereograph served a critical purpose in educating the public, introducing a new visual culture as a way to know what lay beyond their doorsteps, bringing them intimately in touch with the material world. While I have had no desire to employ traditional, two-lens stereographic camera technology in the making of these images, I nonetheless wanted to create a piece that compellingly approximates the object-ness of the two-image stereograph card that references their historical and cultural function. These paired photographs, then, are “non-optical”; they do not produce a three-dimensional effect. The text and period fonts appearing on the “cards,” contextualize the images by making references to antecedent stereographic publishing companies, or government sponsored, nineteenth century U.S. Geological Surveys. The present-day photographs are views of deindustrialized sites, or remnant-building types (or industrial forms) developed during the early twentieth century.

Presenting these photographic images within this faux-stereograph framework (including drop shadow, period type, and borders showing age discoloration) creates an optical illusion—a convincing trompe l’oeil effect—that challenges the viewer to consider what they are looking at. These are at once historical photographs and contemporary images. Utilizing available software and modern printing technology to make an “artifact” that looks antiquated but isn’t, creates an ambiguity that hopefully engages the viewer for more than that split-second of visual consumption that has become our modern habit.

Over the course of Jeff Brouwsʼ career he has created an encyclopedia of imagery devoted to preserving the abandoned artifacts of our heritage. Coaling towers of the railroading’s steam age stand as monuments to our past engineering ingenuity. A forgotten photographic medium is redefined in the twenty-first century. By exploring these subjects in these ways Brouws has created a visual anthology of technological, photographic and architectural history.
Typologies, Projects & Portfolios is Jeff Brouwsʼ sixth exhibition at Robert Mann Gallery. His photographs are included in the permanent collections of The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, The J. Paul Getty Museum, and others. His monographs include Approaching Nowhere (2006), Readymades (2003), Inside the Live Reptile Tent (2001), and Highway: Americaʼs Endless Dream (1998). He is also the co-editor and co-creator of Various Small Books: Referencing Various Small Books by Ed Ruscha (2013, MIT Press). Born in 1955, Brouws lives in Stanfordville, New York.

School of Visual Arts will honor designer and educator Louise Fili with the 28th annual Masters Series Award and Exhibition. “The Masters Series: Louise Fili” will be the first comprehensive retrospective of the designer’s influential career and include her book jacket, branding, food packaging and restaurant identity work. The exhibition will be on view from October 14 through December 10 at the SVA Gramercy Gallery, located at 209 East 23rd Street.
Louise Fili is probably best known for the food and hospitality branding and packaging work she has done through her eponymous design studio, founded in 1989. Her wine bottle and jam jar labels, cookie and cracker boxes and coffee bags can be found in countless pantries and shops, and her visual-identity work has defined the look of dozens of popular bakeries, cafés and restaurants.
But her design career, begun in the 1970s, encompasses much more. For 11 years, Fili was art director at Pantheon Books, where she designed more than 2,000 book covers. Logos that she has created include redesigned marks for the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval and Paperless Post. Her past and present clients include Hyperion Books, Rizzoli, Sarabeth’s, Tate’s Bake Shop, Tiffany & Co., Williams-Sonoma and the U.S. Postal Service. She has authored or co-authored more than 20 books on design and typography is a longtime faculty member of SVA’s BFA and MFA Design departments.
Much of Fili’s work reflects her deep respect for Italian culture, a passion ignited at the age of 16 during a trip to the country, her family’s ancestral home. Fili has continued to fuel her passion for all things Italian with annual trips taken ever since. During a stay in 1990, while researching Italian Art Deco, Fili fostered her penchant for Italian 1930s poster design and discovered a collection of pasticceria papers that would foreshadow a switch in her career from book design to food packaging.
Fili’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Cooper Hewitt Museum and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France. Her many honors include medals for life time achievement from the AIGA and Type Directors Club, gold and silver medals from the Society of Illustrators and the New York Art Directors Club, the Premio Grafico from the Bologna Book Fair and three James Beard Award nominations.
In 1988, SVA founder Silas H. Rhodes instituted the College’s Masters Series, an award and exhibition honoring great visual communicators of our time. Although the achievements of many groundbreaking designers, illustrators, art directors and photographers are known to and lauded by their colleagues, their names often go unrecognized by the general public. The Masters Series brings greater exposure to those whose influence has been felt strongly and by many, yet without widespread recognition.
Masters Series laureates are Marshall Arisman, Saul Bass, Michael Bierut, R. O. Blechman, Ivan Chermayeff, Seymour Chwast, Paul Davis, Lou Dorfsman, Heinz Edelmann, Jules Feiffer, Shigeo Fukuda, Tom Geismar, Milton Glaser, April Greiman, Steven Heller, George Lois, Mary Ellen Mark, Ed McCabe, James McMullan, Duane Michals, Tony Palladino, Paula Scher, Edward Sorel, Deborah Sussman, George Tscherny, Paul Rand and Massimo Vignelli.

Don Eddy Exhibition at Nancy Hoffman Gallery October 27–December 10, 2016
An exhibition of new works by Don Eddy opens on October 27 and continues through December 10, comprising works of the past three years. Eddy is one of the few early Photorealist painters who has taken his vision into new terrain, and has expanded his unique painting process. In the ‘70s Eddy painted the California urban landscape, focusing on cars, reflections on cars, bumpers, headlights. The subject came naturally to the son of a car body and fender shop father. The artist moved quickly from cars to storefronts to shelves filled with glassware and toys.
For the past several years Eddy has returned to the urban landscape, this time New York is his main subject with the bridges that span Manhattan Island being a focal point. In juxtaposition to the urban are the artist’s multi-panel works of nature celebrating light and season in the energy of the ocean, a mountain at sunset, a lotus in full bloom.
Painted in 20-30 layers of transparent acrylic over an under painting of three colors (the first being circles about a 20th of an inch in diameter of phthalocyanine green, the second being burnt sienna and the third dioxazine purple). With these three colors he separates warm from cool colors, and then begins to add many layers of transparent color to achieve the final palette of each work.
Eddy writes of his use of multi-panels:
“From 1990, a distinguishing feature of my work has been the format of the work itself. A single painting is made up of two or more panels. There are diptychs, triptychs, and even polyptychs. Freely derived from Medieval altarpieces, the whole is a product of several images. When introduced, this work was greeted with a mixture of puzzlement and resistance. Over time, I sensed a grudging acceptance of the format even though it was not fully understood. But the questions persisted: Why was it necessary? What function did it perform? and What did it mean? Though unusual in contemporary representational art, there is much to recommend a multi- paneled format. I could write a small book on the many advantages of deploying this format, but I will limit myself to a discussion of one issue: the tension between perception and experience. To address this issue I will introduce you to “the problem of the corn plant”.
“On Easter Sunday, maybe 35 years ago, I was given the gift of a tiny house plant, commonly known as a corn plant. A simple present of no particular interest to me, I probably accepted it with poorly disguised contempt. Over time, though, I developed a fondness for the plant and took care to nurture it. In due course it grew from a wee thing into something approaching a small tree (about 190cm). Today, having traveled with it from place to place it sits majestically in my front window.
“If you were to visit me, sooner or later, it would likely attract your attention. What you would see would not seem all that special, just a fairly large house plant that is clearly thriving. I, on the other hand, would see 35 years of my life. Standing in front of that humble plant I would see my daughter, growing from a small child to a
successful adult. I would see a marriage dissolve, and, in time, a new and permanent love take its place. I would see the winding road of a career in art, the ups and downs, the slow maturation of the work. Simply put, you would perceive the plant. I would experience, in that plant, the flow of my life. But not really. Even you, with no prior experience of this particular plant, would not so much ”see“ the plant as experience it through the veil of your hopes, preferences, prejudices, and history.
”The problem of the corn plant“ is: How does one deal with the richness of experience as it is embodied in simple ”things“? And how does one communicate that in the context of art? This creates a special difficultly for representation art. It illuminates a substantial weakness when depicting ”things“ on a single paneled work of art. If I were to, let's say, paint that corn plant, how would I imbue it with the depth and richness of my experience? I would contend that it cannot be done in the context of a single paneled representational painting. You can affect mood, emotion, and psychology, but not experience. You could attempt to deal with the problem by including many images on a single panel, but that inevitably invokes the burdensome specter of Surrealism with its attendant psychological issues.
“After years of struggle and resistance, it occurred to me that the solution was to adopt the format of multi-paneled paintings. The inevitable subject of a multi-paneled painting is not ”things“ but ”relationships." In such a work, a conversation is generated among images that is more like our experience than our perception. It is not necessarily a didactic conversation with a preconceived meaning. Rather, meaning is generated in the context of a dynamic encounter among the multiple images and the observer. Existentially, no meaning preexists the dialogue. As in our life, meaning is generated, in time, and in active encounters with people, places, and things. Our personal narratives, our personal histories are our narratives and histories only in retrospect. In the present, we have dynamic encounters in time that generate our experience and meaning. That is what my work hopes to do.”
Don Eddy was born in Long Beach, California in 1944. He received a B.F.A. in 1967 and an M.F.A. in 1969 from the University of Hawaii. The artist attended the University of California, Santa Barbara, 1969-70, for post-graduate study.
Don Eddy’s work has been widely shown throughout this country at the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; Bergstrom-Mahler Museum, Neenah, Wisconsin; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida; Boise Art Museum, Idaho; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh; The Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine; New York; Center for the Arts, Vero Beach, Florida; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, Massachusetts, Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina; Heckscher Museum, Huntington, New York; The Huntington Museum of Art, West Virginia; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; Mana Art Center, Jersey City, New Jersey; Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Nassau County Museum of Art, Roslyn Harbor, New York; The Oakland Museum, California; Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma; Orlando Museum of Art, Florida; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Desert, California; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; The Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma; Polk Museum of Art, Lakeland, Florida; San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Tampa Museum of Art, Florida; Tucson Museum of Art, Arizona; Virginia
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Beach Center for the Arts, Virginia; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; Whitney Museum of America Art, New York; Wichita Art Museum, Kansas; Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers, University, New Brunswick, New Jersey; among others, and abroad at Aarhus Kunst Museum, Denmark; Australia National Gallery, Canberra; Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, United Kingdom; Gl. Holtegaards, Copenhagen; Centro Mostre, Rome; Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin; The Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon; in Japan at City Museum of Iwaki; Hokodate Museum of Art, Hokkaido; Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art; and Prefectural Museum of Iwate; Kunstverein, Hannover; Kunsthalle, Nuremberg; Musée de Strasbourg: Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, France; Musée d’Ixelle, Belgium; El Museo del Arte Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain; Museu Europeu d’Art Modern, Barcelona, Spain; National Museum in Gdansk, Poland; and Salas de Exposiciones de Bellas Artes, Madrid.
The artist’s work is represented in the collections of Akron Art Museum, Ohio; Boise
Art Museum, Idaho; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu; Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, Massachusetts; Evansville Museum of Arts, History & Science, Indiana; Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana; Galleries of the Claremont Colleges, California; Haggin Museum, Stockton, California; Hofstra University Museum, Hempstead, New York; Honolulu Academy of Arts, Hawaii; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Oklahoma City Museum of Art, Oklahoma; Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence; Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; San Antonio Museum of Art, Texas; Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California; Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, Kentucky; Springfield Art Museum, Missouri; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York; The Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; U.S. Embassy Jakarta, Art in Embassies Program, U.S. Department of State; University Museum of Contemporary Art, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Massachusetts; among others, and in collections abroad: Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Musee D’Art Moderne de Saint-Etienne Metropole, St. Etienne, France; Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia; Museu Europeu d’Art Modern, Barcelona, Spain; Neue Galerie, Aachen, Germany; Utrecht Museum, The Netherlands.
Don Eddy resides in New York.
For further information and/or photographs please call 212-966-6676 or e-mail Nancy Hoffman Gallery at info@nancyhoffmangallery.com.
Yours sincerely,
Nancy Hoffman

DRISCOLL BABCOCK GALLERIES presents Harriet Bart: Strong Silent Type, an installation in blackened steel, shaded paper, mirrored chrome, and dark cloth exploring the myriad ways to be seen and to see one’s self: a provocative meditation on the deeply human drive to assemble the pieces of our identities. Bart’s mirrored and matte surfaced fragments recall pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that never quite fit together, inviting examination of gender archetypes and the way fragments speak to the absence of the whole.

Bart received her formal training in textile arts and architectural tapestry, a purposeful choice to assert the relevance of what has long been considered “feminine labor.” In pondering minimalism, an arena dominated by male artists since its inception, Bart translates curvilinear fragments of feminine garment patterns into minimalist objects. In doing so, she allows these fluid shapes to find roots in the body. Like clothing itself, worn to both cover the body and express its being, Bart references the way our inner selves are outwardly expressed but only inwardly experienced.

These undulating shapes in blackened steel are installed as a stoic constellation on the wall, forming the armor of Bart’s “strong silent type.” The same shapes in chromed steel are installed on the floor, a shattered pond for the contemporary Narcissus. As one leans over the pond, the body and the being fracture. Ten slim mirrors on an adjacent wall allow a respite from ruminating on the shapes of the body – allowing only a sliver view of one’s eyes, into the proverbial soul.

A black tapestry titled PENUMBRA exists in dialogue with REMNANTS, anodized aluminum shelves encasing spools of thread, castaways of the traditionally feminine, painstaking art form of weaving thread into cloth. In NOTION, a spool of thread becomes biomorphic in its partially used state, sitting preserved on an industrial gear underneath a protective bell jar.

Bart has juxtaposed our desire to project ourselves with our need to protect ourselves. The blackened steel shapes are a shield from reflection and from the gaze of others. She suggests there is power and significance in both - in visibility - the process of identity construction, and in the resistance to false dichotomies and expected roles.

In this body of work, Bart delineates the polarity of gendered traits and trades into a commentary on what it means to construct our authentic selves. She offers these altered mirrors of the body, split into pieces and parts, the armor of selfhood in contrast to the reflective nature of identity.

DRISCOLL BABCOCK GALLERIES presents LUIGI TERRUSO: WONDER WHEEL, a selection of kaleidoscopic paintings in which imagery is a momentary stasis between the artist’s memory and imaginings. Terruso’s whimsical and dynamic compositions reference biomorphic and architectural forms, each canvas composed of objects that have been fractured and recombined, undergoing a mechanical metamorphosis.

Terruso’s fragmented visual world is inspired in part by his international travels – 18 countries in the past 24 months, including residencies with pop-up studios near Angkor Wat in Cambodia and in a mountain village outside of Cuenca, Ecuador. During this period, Terruso made more than 100,000 photographs that now fuel the prismatic permutations of these creations.

The results from this visual feast are nested on these canvases: the frenetic patterns of plastic toys piled high outside the hutongs of Shanghai, rusty industrial refuse orderly arranged on the street in Ho Chi Min City, intricate and delightful stickers and painted designs on long-distance hauling trucks encountered at truck stops in India.

In INTERFACE, the artist employs a human form as an imagined character, here evoking traditional portraiture while forcibly expanding its limits. WONDER WHEEL alludes to both the artist’s reverence for the circular form’s ubiquity in organic and created worlds, and the structures of our youth, cemented in memories of adventure, grandiose comic heroes, and whirling carnival rides.

Thomas Erben Gallery is pleased to present Hoar Frost, Elaine Stocki's second exhibition with the gallery. Hoar Frost refers to the rare crystallization that descends upon the natural world overnight, momentarily suspending it and symbolically evoking the unease that has crept into our collective present.

In these new works, the artist reverses her processes, merging abstract painting with her history of working with the figure in photography. Whereas Stocki's prior exhibition comprised primarily hand-tinted black and white photographs, the color prints in Hoar Frost integrate painting within the process of photographing. Gestural mark making appears in the images, uniting various elements of performance, installation and documentation.

In the central triptych of the exhibition - Untitled I, II and III - large square photographs depict clusters of heads, tense crowds in which each member holds a different expression. Stocki selected portraits from her archive, applying them to fur covered lumps to create sculptural heads that are suspended from the ceiling of her studio. The ramshackle crowd is framed by an unfinished painting, existing in an environment that has been splattered throughout. The three photographs vary subtly in composition as well as deteriorated color and are displayed on a golden wall. This veneer of decadence is in contrast to Stocki's subjects, which are neither the groups of angels portrayed within Baroque churches, nor the inhabitants of a world of material luxury. Hanging by a string, these forms recall not opulence, but precarity.

In this regard, Stocki's works are very much of the moment. In her prior body of photographs, which is on display in the project space, there was a private sensibility: her subjects, largely strangers, were portrayed as psychologically ambiguous. Now, the works focus on the unease of the current social climate; marked simultaneously by insecurity and excess.

Cherry Blossom portrays a man's head as the apex of a pile of candy boxes. He is positioned in front of a brown background, with red drips contouring his shadow. Displayed beside is a painting of the same color, which serves as a physical extension of the photograph's backdrop. In Mikki, a nude woman appears mirrored partly on top of herself; her twinned, transparent bodies seeming to absorb the stained marks on the painting behind her.

Stocki revels in the union of photography and painting, producing constructions that join the two practices in unexpected, subtle ways and that question the interdependency of the two mediums. Through her use of formal language and ambiguous subject matter, Stocki creates intriguing images that lay outside established conventions.

Elaine Stocki holds an MFA from Yale University (2009) and has been awarded numerous grants including a Tierney Fellowship and a Canada Arts Council Project Grant. Her work has been exhibited at the Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto), the Deutsche Guggenheim (Berlin) and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. TIME Magazine's Lightbox, Matte Magazine, Night Papers, TBW Books (monograph) and Golden Spike Press, have all featured her photography. The artist has been nominated for both the Grange Prize (2011) and the Sobey Art Award (2012) and was a previous resident of the Mountain School of Arts. Stocki, who is based in Los Angeles, is currently teaching at Fullerton University and is a visiting critic at Yale. Her work is included in the permanent collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

In his newest series of twenty-one works, Christoph Ruckhӓberle replaces oil paints with dramatic contrasts rendered in high gloss enamel. Influenced by his experience as a master printmaker accustomed to creating compositions with an economy of means, the artist exploits various techniques of drawing, cutting and taping to achieve stark juxtapositions of flatness and depth. The bold pigments are not mixed, and different layers of hues react with one another to create inconsistencies that themselves become the attestations of painterly gesture

Ruckhӓberle continues to wrestle, challenge and confront the masters that have come before. Alluding to traditional ideals of painting, which may be both revered and criticized, his subject, in fact, becomes painting itself.

The artist has been widely acclaimed including several reviews in The New York Times which first described the work as “refreshingly unlike the usual painterly fare in Chelsea,” (Ken Johnson, 2004), later noted that he "seems to approach painting as an open book, of which any page can be ripped out, as long as it is used in, and not simply pasted to, the present” (Roberta Smith, 2006) and then described his 2013 exhibition at ZieherSmith as “an arresting show that makes us remember what all the fuss was about” (Karen Rosenberg).

His work has been exhibition extensively in museums internationally, including in 2016 at the Nationale Art Museum & Goethe Institut Hanoi, Vietnam and the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas. Notable collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Rubell Collection, Miami, Florida.

Skarstedt is pleased to announce a multimedia exhibition of works from Thomas Schütte’s Frauen series, featuring both sculptures and a suite of etchings. Over the course of a decade, Schütte produced a group of 18 monumental sculptures made of bronze, steel and aluminum. Utilizing traditional materials and methods of production, Schütte created visceral works that thoroughly examine and expand the relationship between the female form and sculpture, and are amongst the artist’s best known and highly praised work. Schütte’s etchings from 2006 introduce an intimate vantage point on the Frauen figures with delicate details, juxtaposed with the immediate physicality of the sculptures on which they are based. Frauen will be on view at Skarstedt Chelsea (550 West 21st Street) from September 15th through October 22nd, 2016.

These expansively scaled sculptures were derived from a selection of ceramic models Schütte made between 1997 and 1999. Beginning at such a modest size, and working with a malleable material such as clay, enabled the artist to submit these forms into contortions and spatial abstractions that appear otherworldly in this monumental scale. A number of these recumbent figures call to mind classic female nudes, while others are so distorted that the female shape is barely recognizable having been brutally transformed.

Schütte takes on this highly charged subject matter with his characteristic skepticism, constantly questioning the perception and purpose of art throughout history. He considers the complex relationship between the male gaze and depiction of the female nude by introducing contradictions, such as power and vulnerability. The women are staged on platforms as victims of the attitudes of a male dominated past, yet simultaneously maintain a striking presence in scale, commanding respect from their audience.

This study, which expands our understanding of the female form, continues the lineage of his predecessors Henry Moore, Aristide Maillol, and Auguste Rodin in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the artist’s inimitable unique and subversive black humor.

Lehmann Maupin will present an exhibition of new paintings and sculpture by Chinese artist Liu Wei, shown across the gallery's two New York locations, with the Chelsea gallery featuring a site-specific installation.

Gladstone Gallery, in collaboration with Fondazione Merz, is pleased to present an exhibition of historic early works by Mario Merz. A leading member of Italy’s Arte Povera movement of the 1960s and 70s, Merz created paintings, sculptures, and installations with an aim to oppose a monolithic culture and to celebrate perplexity. This goal manifested itself in the artist’s deviation from the mass-media iconography popularized by Pop Art, the mythic emotionalism of Abstract Expressionism, and the machismo detachment of Minimalism. Instead, Merz and his Arte Povera contemporaries – such as Alighiero e Boetti, Luciano Fabro, and Jannis Kounellis, among others – employed simple, everyday materials and perceptive references to nature in order to ground their art in a relatable existential ambiguity.

The three seminal works on view in this exhibition exemplify this stratagem. Giap Igloo – If the Enemy Masses His Forces, He Looses Ground: If He Scatters, He Loses Strength (1968) represents a body of work that became an enduring motif throughout Merz’s career, since he began making igloo sculptures in 1967. Using the exterior world to create an interior space, igloos encapsulate Merz’s drive to utilize social tradition as a means for individual reflection. At once a freestanding structure, this hemisphere is rendered meaningless without an inhabitant to provide utilitarian import. The instillation of subjective weight onto the objective form of the igloo is underscored by the neon words circumscribing the dome. A quotation from General Vo Nguyen Giap of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front describing the double-bind of combat strategy, the glowing letters provide a visual tension to the cracking clay exterior, while highlighting the artist’s fascination with social mores – in this case, military and political custom.

Further showcasing Merz’s interest in exploring a collective conscience through prosaic media is his boxlike sculpture, Sitin (1968). The title of the work invokes the physical act of using one’s body to occupy space – a fact emphasized by the position of the sculpture on the gallery’s floor – and also points to the global escalation of political protests in 1968, of which the sit-in was an often-used technique. Through this gesture, Merz emphasizes the social significance of sitting as individual stance and collective action.

The large-scale installation, La bottiglia di Leyda (Leyden Jar), provides a visual culmination of Merz’s Arte Povera endeavors: physical space is redefined as both deeply personal and simultaneously universal through the use of common materials. With wire mesh covering every wall of the gallery, Merz invites viewers into a communal environment that proudly incorporates the natural world, all while neon lights spell out the Fibonacci sequence. A remarkable numeric sequence that seems to exist throughout nature (from pinecones to snail shells), the Fibonacci numbers in this work stress a belief that, even though the world around us is sometimes inexplicable and chaotic, there is an order uniting us all.

Mario Merz was born in 1925 and died in 2003 in Milan, Italy. He was awarded the Praemium Imperiale, Tokyo; the Oskar Kokoschka Prize, Vienna; and the Arnold Bode Prize, Kassel. Merz was the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at institutions around the world, including Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Welhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisberg; Fundación Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. His work is included in many prominent public collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and the Art Institute of Chicago, among many others. The Fondazione Merz in Turin, Italy, regularly displays both the works of its namesake and sponsors exhibitions by living artists.

International Print Center New York presents the exhibition Black Pulp!, featuring contemporary works by an intergenerational selection of 21 artists from the Black Diaspora in dialogue with rare historical books, comics, newspapers, and related ephemera created by both Black and non-Black artists committed to foregrounding and empowering African-American experience.

Jacob Lewis Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of Hajime Sorayama and present the artist’s first solo exhibition at the gallery, on view October 28–December 17, 2016, with an opening reception October 27, 6-8pm.

Sorayama’s newest body of work features his signature “Sexy Robots” in the form of Hollywood starlets, retro-future pinups and pop cultural idols. In the artist’s superrealistic renderings, Kate Moss becomes a bionic Playboy bunny, Snow White’s queen a dominatrix and Elvis a laser emitting radio transmitter.

Hajime Sorayama has been a cult figure since the early 70s, and is considered a pioneer of this highly rendered airbrush aesthetic. Over the course of his prolific artistic career, he has collaborated with numerous brands, musicians and publications. He designed the first generation entertainment robot Sony AIBO and the cover art for Aerosmith’s 2001 album “Just Push Play,” among other commercial projects. The influence of his work extends far beyond the boundaries of Japan's underground art scene, stretching the limits of outmoded notions of high and low art.

The winter solstice invites thoughts of darkness invading light and in return, the "lights’ on”. Light and darkness are the modality of painting. FIRST STREET GALLERY’S group of artists will approach the nature of light in many diverse ways.

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present No Work Today, the Gallery’s first solo exhibition with Dutch artist and designer Parra. Known for his minimalist, reductive visual vocabulary, Parra’s work possesses a magnetism and style that is unparalleled. The artist will present a new series of twelve works on canvas, ink drawings, and sculpture, with a reception taking place on Thursday, November 17, 2016.

Characterized by curvaceous line work and bold, complementary color palettes, Parra’s work in fine art over the past decade has evolved into an expression that is distinctly his. Evoking influences of Roy Lichtenstein and Tom Wesselmann in their bold, poppy graphics, Parra’s work is inspired by his everyday surroundings, popular culture, and his love of music. For each body of work, the thematic undertones to Parra’s art develop later in the creative process, with the formal compositions dictating the direction of each series. The artist elaborates, “I collect images in my head from what I see around me in the times I’m not painting, and then scribble them down with pencil… the theme plays a big part but I focus mainly on the composition, and that it will be a painting that is interesting to look at.” As the title of the exhibition suggests, the subject matter for No Work Today playfully explores simple leisurely pleasures from staying in bed and reading a book, to reclining poolside.

In contrast to earlier work from Parra, these new works elaborate on a shift in style for the artist, whose work became recognizable for its hybridized characters with bird-like features. The work produced over the past year completely eliminates the figures’ faces, focusing further on the voluptuous formal language of the female nude. The titular work from the show—No Work Today—evokes the sensual eroticism of a Wesselmann nude reclining on a bed, reduced to its simplest forms via the artist’s careful rendering of shapes in complementary color palettes of cerulean, crimson and white hues. Other works such as The Floods, explore this reduction of forms further. Pushing toward abstraction, their flat, solid shapes hint at the suggestion of a figure, the limbs and head fitting together like a jigsaw puzzle. This seductive exploration of curved forms extends beyond the canvas to life-size sculpture in Sleeping Lady.

Born in Maastricht, the Netherlands in 1976, Parra has mounted successful international exhibitions including a 2015 retrospective exhibition at Rotterdam’s Kunsthal, and a commissioned 60-foot mural at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2012. In 2011, the artist won the prestigious D&AD silver pencil award for illustration and a Dutch Design Award for Best Illustration in 2010. More recently, Parra’s work was exhibited in Takashi Murakami and Juxtapoz Magazine’s collaborative exhibition Juxtapoz x Superflat, continuing Murakami’s vision of amalgamating contemporary art and various subcultures exhibited alongside each other. The exhibition will continue its journey this year to Vancouver Art Gallery, Canada. Selected solo exhibitions include I Can’t Look at Your Face Anymore at Ruttkowski68, Cologne, Germany (2016), Salut at Alice Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (2015), Same Old Song at HVW8 Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2014), and Il Senso di Colpa at Galleria Patricia Armocida, Milan, Italy (2013). Group exhibitions include Summer Mixer at Joshua Liner Gallery, New York, NY (2016), UN/LIMITED, A Poster Project at Musée des Beaux-Arts, Le Locle, Switzerland (2013), Animate Everything at Protein Gallery, London, United Kingdom (2011), and Go Font Yourself at Peer Gallery, Sydney, Australia (2010).

Cristin Tierney Gallery is pleased to present Classic Attitude, an exhibition of hard-edged abstract paintings from the early 1960s by Helen Lundeberg. Classic Attitude opens on Thursday, November 3rd with a reception from 6:00 to 8:00 pm. This is the gallery’s first exhibition of Lundeberg’s work.

Helen Lundeberg was a leading figure of west coast abstraction in the post-war era. An active painter and writer, she was at the epicenter of a dynamic group of Los Angeles artists and critics that included Lorser Feitelson, Karl Benjamin, Jules Langsner, John McLaughlin, and Frederick Hammersley. Along with her peers, Lundeberg’s work formed the core of what later became known as California hard-edged painting. Although her contributions to American abstraction have long been recognized on the west coast, Lundeberg has yet to receive her due in the east.

In the 1960s Lundeberg created a body of work considered to be her finest and most distinct. Distilled to essential elements of line, color, and space, her hard-edged paintings from this period effect a coherence of composition that borders on the sublime. Classic Attitude presents a selection of paintings from this moment, featuring works that are united by their compositional balance, subtleties of color, and pictorial refinement. The title of the exhibition derives from a statement Lundeberg wrote for a 1942 exhibition at MoMA:

By classicism I mean, not traditionalism of any sort, but a highly conscious concern with esthetic
structure which is the antithesis of intuitive, romantic, or realistic approaches to painting. My aim,
realized or not, is to calculate, and reconsider, every element in a painting with regard to its
function in the whole organization. That, I believe, is the classic attitude.[1]

Lundeberg’s attention to formal elements such as balance and color connect her to a previous generation of abstract artists, including Henri Matisse, Piet Mondrian, and Josef Albers. Similarly, her reductive forms, flat surfaces, and spare compositions link her to contemporaries such as Ad Reinhardt, Ellsworth Kelly, and Agnes Martin. But unlike these other artists, Lundeberg's vision of abstraction remained connected to the world around her. In Desert Road, Lundeberg’s flat, unmodulated swaths of color coalesce to form the view suggested by the painting’s title. Dramatic landscapes and architectural vistas such as these were composed of forms remembered—things “imagined rather than 'seen,'” as she stated later in life.[2] The works presented in Classic Attitude encapsulate Lundeberg’s uniquely classic approach, and underscore her rightful place in the art historical canon.

Helen Lundeberg (1908-1999) was born in Chicago and graduated from Pasadena City College in 1930. She co-founded the movement Subjective Classicism, also known as Post Surrealism, before becoming an integral part of the west coast abstract circle. In spring 2016 The Laguna Art Museum presented a retrospective of her work. She has also had solo exhibitions at The Fresno Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, University Art Museum in Santa Barbara, Long Beach Museum of Art, and Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Norton Simon Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Laguna Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Orange County Museum of Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, San Diego Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Norton Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, and Fresno Art Museum.

For more information please contact Candace Moeller at +1.212.594.0550 or candace@cristintierney.com.